Since the pandemic shifted many jobs to work-from-home (or anywhere) and the Great Resignation|Reshuffle|Renegotiation|Rethink further upended our work order, organizations have been madly surveying and throwing a lot of stuff at the wall to lure and keep the people they need to run their businesses.

There’s no question that our relationship to work has forever shifted, at least for those whose jobs don’t require a physical presence, and we’ll be wrestling and experimenting with this before we figure it out.

It didn’t start with a pitch deck or a business plan. In 2009 while walking in his San Fernando neighborhood, Rick Nahmais noticed citrus trees bursting with fruit that would mostly end up in the trash. Food lines were growing as the Great Recession ravaged people’s lives and livelihoods. The light bulb went on. The following three weekends, he and a few volunteers harvested over 800 lbs of oranges and tangerines from a friend’s yard and took them to a local food pantry.

Groundhog Day again. Gallup released its State of the Workplace: 2022 report and one headline, Stressed, Sad, and Anxious: A Snapshot of the Workforce, summarizes what is a surprise to no one.

What is a bit different about it, though, is despite the myriad reasons for misery at work shouting at us from headlines daily, Gallup lays blame at the feet of managers.

When Jack Dorsey stepped back into Twitter in 2016, he inherited an annual loss of over $500 million on revenues of $2.2 billion, and a languishing stock price, when other platforms were booming. Dorsey reflected recently, “We got overly reactive to everything our peers were doing. We didn’t have a clear sense of what our purpose was, and that really hurt us a lot.”

To get a clear understanding of what business Twitter was really in, Dorsey and his team used a framework known as “jobs to be done.” They mined data to understand what users were “hiring them” to do, prioritized what was core for them, and aligned the organization to that core.

A common theme has emerged in the last many months for leaders I work with, sending them scrambling for direction. Climate events, racial violence and discrimination, #MeToo, and the head-shaking economic inequities made worse during the pandemic have combined to cause employees to demand action. Leaders are experiencing staff conflict, confusion, and anger, and are losing valued people. People are expressing dissatisfaction with internal processes that they feel perpetuate systemic discrimination and inequality and some leaders are being pressured to take public activist positions on issues. Sometimes the issues are outside the organization’s mission.

We spent the last four posts taking a deep dive into how to inclusively unearth the solid core of an organization: vision + mission + values. It’s exhilarating to find just the right words that capture our true essence, and to share and celebrate it. Yet, it’s just the beginning of the beginning. Living our vision, mission, and values — what connects us to the cathedral we’re building together vs. individually laying bricks — is the real work.

In The Culture Code, Dan Coyle recalls in 1982 when J&J learned, to their utter horror, that seven people died in Chicago after ingesting cyanide-laced Tylenol. They faced a crisis they were utterly unprepared for, they had no playbook. But they had something much more powerful that drove one of their first decisions (ignoring advice from FDA and the FBI) to recall all 31 million pills on the market at a cost of $100 million.

After establishing vision + mission + values as the solid core of a business, we explored the first leg of the stool: the vision — a vivid and detailed picture of success at a chosen point in the future. Coincidentally, Zingerman's last week rolled out their 2032 vision. Their visioning guru, Ari Weinzweig wrote about it in his weekly email, showing how powerful a good vision is — how it can guide an organization to greatness. It’s an inspiring read.

Now, we turn to the second leg of the stool: the mission.

I’d been facilitating vision + mission + values work for almost a decade when I found myself in a ZingTrain Visioning workshop wondering how Zingerman’s, a community of businesses in Ann Arbor, Michigan, spawned from a humble deli, had come up with a tool that would transform visioning and strategy for my clients. Most vision statements are one-liners like Unilever’s “To be the global leader in sustainable business” — lofty, yet not particularly actionable — more of a tagline than a specific future people can build together.

With Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JP Morgan/Chase combining forces, and Atul Gawande leading it, how could the Haven healthcare venture not work? Formed in 2018 to provide less expensive, better, and easier healthcare in the U.S., Haven is shutting down after just three years. In fact, it seems it never really got going.

Too many meetings — meetings without a purpose, redundant meetings, or meetings called instead of a simple email or quick conversation. Even when they’re necessary, too many people are there, many show up late and tap away on computers or are glued to phone screens, loud voices dominate, discussions go long and veer off-topic, and mind-numbing PowerPoint decks zap energy. Nothing useful gets done. And bad meetings can take up even more time at the “meeting after the meeting,” where people let off steam with each other about how bad the meeting was. I often hear “I have to come in early, stay late, or work the weekends to get my work done because I’m in meetings all day.”

Culture woes. They’re a constant: my team isn’t gelling. We’re missing deadlines. Mistakes keep repeating. We’re siloed. We show up late to meetings even though we committed to being on time. Or, even at home: chores we agreed to go ignored, or some sort of disrespect has crept in.

How do we create the culture we’re aiming for?

No, not Dairy Queen. This DQ stands for “decency quotient.” I love the word decency. Respectable and moral behavior. DQ hit my radar earlier this year when Bill Boulding, dean of Duke’s B-School, penned an HBR piece inspired by Mastercard CEO Ajay Banga. Fast Company gave it a mention recently and connected the concept to the Business Roundtable’s recent Statement of Purpose committing member companies to move beyond shareholder returns, and “lead their companies for the benefit of all stakeholders — customers, employees, suppliers, communities, and shareholders.” This so-called “new capitalism” is encouraging. Let’s hope it takes hold.

Most of us don’t hate change. What we don’t like is when it comes out of the blue, makes no sense, and is done to us, not with us. Drop-kicking change into an organization from the top down can lead to ill-informed, misguided fixes, as well as resentment and victimhood.

“I don’t really know how I’m doing” is a familiar refrain. Even when an organization has a 360-feedback process and regular performance check-ins, people are still not sure how they’re doing or why they may not be progressing as quickly as they’d like. As a bookend to this, managers struggle with how to put words to the feedback they’re trying to give. They want it to be clear and actionable, yet they find their conversations often don’t deliver.

Culture is the “it” of our current work moment. And for good reason, as Peter Drucker coined, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” The way things get done in an organization — the systems, behaviors, and practices — guided by a set of values, define its culture. (And sometimes the values that are actually lived are not the ones on the website.) How we work together drives our personal engagement and performance, which in turn determines how well the organization does.

Four MIT robotics-obsessed engineering students had a complaint. Then they got to work. The water polo teammates were united by a love and appreciation of delicious and healthy food, and a frustration that it cost $10 to $14, out of reach of their student budgets. They called on their combined smarts, curiosity, swagger tempered by humility, and, not knowing any better, built proof-of-concept robotic woks in their fraternity basement.

At its core, coaching is a fusion of questions that open doors, deep listening, and keen observation used to help people find their own answers. It’s based on the belief that the best way forward lies within us, and that learning is more powerful and sticky when we figure things out for ourselves. And, we really don’t like to be told what to do… even when we ask to be told what to do. Just hang out with any two-year-old.

Looking up from the table in my office, there’s an entire shelf of books focused on how to communicate with each other including: Radical Candor, Fierce Conversations, Difficult Conversations, Crucial Conversations, and Thanks for the Feedback, I googled “most popular books on feedback.” One of the top hits was “48 Best Feedback Books of All Time.” Forty-eight?

A big problem in solving problems is knowing what the real problem is. This is a constant in my work with individuals, organizations, and in my own life! Rule of thumb is that the problem we think we have usually isn’t the real problem. It takes some detective work to get to the root. And good root-finding can lead to good solution-finding.

I was eager to dig into my research paper for the coaching program at Columbia University. I wanted to discover ways to make tools for my clients really stick. You know what I’m talking about: you read a great book or take a workshop and have inspirational aha’s. You mark pages with Post-its and can’t wait to put it all to use. Only you don’t.